Leaked Call of Duty Season 4 skin comes from the game's coolest mission

The night came and went, and for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare fans, Season 4 is still MIA. But one leaked piece of content from the new season, the Tier 1 skin for the new multiplayer Operator character Captain Price, is a familiar one to anyone who's played the single player campaign.

What happened? — On Tuesday, Reddit user u/buffalowings21940 shared in the subreddit r/CODWarzone a player in the multiplayer lobby playing with the unreleased Captain Price skin. They did not provide any more information, but visual evidence suggests the person using the skin is a developer for Infinity Ward based on the exclusive camouflage skin they outfitted their gun. It is a skin not available to players but to members of Infinity Ward.

This isn't the first leak of Captain Price as a multiplayer skin in the game. Over the past week, leaks on Reddit have shown users accessing the Captain Price skin, mostly through an accidental glitch. But this Tuesday leak is the first to show Captain Price from head to toe, which confirms a fun thing: His skin comes directly from a specific multiplayer mission.

Clean House — In the fifth mission of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign, Captain Price and Kyle "Gaz" Garrick (controlled by the player) lead an SAS team to raid a London townhouse occupied by Al-Qatala members. The mission is to find intelligence that pinpoints the location of "The Wolf," the leader of Al-Qatala.

The mission is remembered for being played under cover of darkness and in extremely close quarters. Armed with night vision goggles, the player must tactically target enemies, rather than pull the trigger all willy nilly. It's a change of pace from the usual run-and-gun scenarios throughout the rest of the game.

Captain Price appears in the mission in his usual gear, but he's got a pair of night-vision goggles on his head. It's this specific variation of Price that players will play as when Price becomes available as an Operator when Season 4 is made available.

Let's be clear about something: The single-player story campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is all about the morally subterranean depths that western military powers go in order to combat terrorism. Infiltrating a neighborhood packed with families is not "cool." But in the context of the player experience in a hyper-realistic video game shooter, the mission is well-designed, novel, and memorable in how it significantly changes the otherwise relentless pace of a typical Call of Duty chapter. So in that sense, it is a "cool" mission.

When players can use Captain Price — Despite rumors that the delayed launch of Season 4 would happen this week, the new season of content is still without a release date. This has left players antsy that they're not playing with any of the game's new toys a whole week after they were originally promised.

Still, the new season is coming sooner than you think, sources close to the game tell Inverse. When exactly that is, no one outside Infinity Ward knows for sure. For now, it's not a bad time to check off remaining challenges, or maybe even check out a TV show that stars someone you might recognize.

There is no new launch date for Season 4 of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.